Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli sent a Bits
from... mail reporting some of his recent activities. He started
with a call to help Debian's Release Team as the current members need more help
getting the upcoming release of Debian 6.0 Squeeze ready.
He also mentioned some interviews and public appearances he had, and
delegations of the Debian System Administrators and a Debian Auditor. In
a summary of his report of his recent visit to the Ubuntu Developer Summit,
he asked for volunteers to act as the contact point for Debian derivatives.
Their job would be to help developers of Debian derivatives to find ways to
contribute back to Debian.

Debian Developer Petter Reinholdtsen announced
that after enabling reordering the init scripts of a boot sequence back in
last July, parallel booting is now also enabled by default in recent
installations, which should help to reduce boot and shutdown times of new
Debian systems. There is still some work left
to do which would further improve shutdown speed of Debian systems, such
as reducing the number of scripts that just kill a daemon during shutdown.

Over four years ago the Debian Project decided to open up the
archive of its private mailing list for everyone after a period of
three years. With this three year period being over for the first posts,
Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli is now
looking for volunteers to look through the archive, contact authors of
these mails and open the archive. Martin Krafft proposed
to change the workflow, by making parts of the archive open on a regular basis
and letting people delete mails they don't want to see published. Several
problems were pointed out with this approach, such as that people might have resigned as Developers
in the past three years and therefore no longer have enough access to delete their mails.

William Pitcock explained
that due to some limitations (for example in the size of supported kernels) the boot
loader LILO is about to be removed
from the upcoming release of Debian 6.0 Squeeze. He therefore asked
users to test the replacement boot loader GRUB 2.

Debian Developer Petter Reinholdtsen announced
some changes he is introducing into Debian's installation system to allow more
flexible handling of the loading of firmware files (binary programs loaded and
executed in hardware, for example some network adaptors). Steve McIntyre, leader of
the Debian CD/DVD team, has already adapted
the build system for CD/DVD images to reflect these changes and created some test
images.

Ana Guerrero noticed
that quite a few of the recent Non-Maintainer Uploads are quite intrusive
and reminded NMUers to keep changes minimal.

After visiting the Électricité de France Research and Development centre, Debian
Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli blogged
about their reasons for basing their cluster (and an increasing number of desktops,
too) on Debian. One of their main reasons was the large amount of scientific
software available as packages and the high quality standards Debian sets.

Aurélien Jarno reported a bit
about Debian's switch from GLIBC to EGLIBC.

Debian System Administrator Martin Zobel-Helas announced
that with the successful introduction of a GeoDNS setup, the experimental subzone
security.geo.debian.org is obsolete and should be replaced by the normal
security.debian.org entry in /etc/apt/sources.list files.

After wondering what distribution specific tools Debian's KDE might miss,
Sune Vuorela reported some
of the feedback he got. To quote him: All in all, it looks like we are
quite far already. We just need to get the last bits put together.

According to the unofficial
RC-bugs count, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0
Squeeze, is currently affected by 395 release critical bugs. 66 of them
have already been fixed in Debian's unstable branch. Of the remaining
329 release critical bugs, 44 already have a patch (which might need
testing) and 27 are marked as pending.

Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in
contrib or non-free, 199 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list for announcements.

Currently 630 packages are orphaned and 123 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at the
recentreports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.